Recent Reviews
Review: Precious Little Talent by Capital T Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 06, 2012
Precious Little Talent is a charmer and would make a fine "date night."
Capital T Theatre does a graceful and unexpected waltz step with Ella Hickson's Precious Little Talent. Mark Pickell and friends at Capital T have established a strong, edgy style in their stagings, one that fits very well with the karma of their frequent host venue the Hyde Park Theatre. They've presented works by such as Tracy Letts, Sam Shepard, Mickle Maher, Peter Sinn Nachtrieb, David Shinn -- stories of trailer trash, down-and-outers, eccentrics and the lonely …
Review: Four Square by FronteraFest
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 02, 2012
Zarate's choice of an extremely strong and experienced cast helps the audience past those blurs. This piece is rationally irrational, one that keeps you guessing and wraps you up emotionally.
Inevitably, Manuel Zarate's one-act play Four Squarereminds one of Edward Albee's The Zoo Story. There's a chance encounter in a public place with no one else around. A chat between two strangers starts with simple exchanges, courtesies, really, then progresses until we eventually see that one of them is a psychotic and the other is a victim. There's something of the bull ring to the concept, except that instead of the ceremonial squads to do the tormenting, …
Review: Women in Search of Love by FronteraFest
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 02, 2012
Ah, though, the women! They captured my heart.
Last Saturday's FronteraFest "Best of Week 3" brought us a lot of yin and very little yang. Of the five pieces brought forward, four were solos by actresses. Yang did hold its own. The six "Confidence Guys" who did improvised Mamet gave us that playwright's expletives, elisions, incomplete understoods and macho pushiness to the life. After a quick poll of the audience they played it as salesmen in a failing car dealership. Maybe it was …
Review: Somewhere in Utopia (A Travesty) by FronteraFest
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 31, 2012
Face it: there's no use getting annoyed with the theatre of the absurd, no matter how confusing it may seen. Go ahead, get out of your comfort zone and stretch your mind. Maybe getting annoyed will do you good.
Face it: there's no use getting annoyed with the theatre of the absurd, no matter how confusing it may seen. Or even with the neo-theatre of the absurd such as this piece by Jared J. Stein, produced a good 50 years after the audacious thumbing-its-nose-at-the-bourgeois art style hit the European stages. In Somewhere in Utopia Stein portrays a dystopia: two principal characters are fixed unthinkingly before a television screen as the audience files into the black …
Review: Wicked by touring company
by Thaïs Hinton
Published on January 27, 2012
Wicked is a sympathetic tale of an underdog (after all, as Kermit sang, "It's not easy being green!"), diversity and profiling -- an examination of what it means to be good inside if you happen to look bad on the outside.
Everyone knows how Dorothy Gale came to Oz and killed the Wicked Witch of the West. Judy Garland and pals in the 1939 film by MGM dwell deep in American cultural consciousness, none of them more so than Margaret Hamilton as the vengeful Wicked Witch of the West. In the Oz depicted by the touring company of Wicked currently at UT's Bass Concert Hall we get to hear another side of the story, adapted from the …
Review: The Crapstall Street Boys by Trouble Puppet Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 27, 2012
The table action is quick and menacing, presenting a grim dog-eat-dog story -- almost literally -- as YouLad is cast into subhuman circumstances.
Perhaps it's inherent to the art form, but I did have a moment of wondering whether we ought to be concerned about our Connor. The Crapstall Street Boys is captivating puppetry and story telling, as is always the case with the Trouble Puppet Theatre Company, a crew of talented and devoted colleagues and acolytes who've gathered around Connor Hopkins. This time the approach is announced as "Czech puppetry" -- small articulated figures at the end of …